Darkfall Online to be released in December

Well. That’s surprising.

I’ve talked about Darkfall Online before (here, here) and while I found easily the most interesting MMO in development (its concept and all), I was still rather sceptical. It seems I forgot to post (or probably ‘lacked time’ again) about the 17 minute long gameplay trailer that was released a bit more than a month ago, but it was rather interesting, it showed a lot of the game, reminded me of amateur game-videos as it had the same quality, had ugly graphical effects, but at the same time had some very cool things in it. Funny thing is that the developers claimed they intentionally ‘showed it the way it is’ and that the graphical settings were set on low, unlike Age of Conan trailers (or cinematic trailers).

Well, it seems they gave a hour-long presentation at some gaming event in Athens and some news of was released. According to a greek gaming website they’ve been running a beta since 22 September. The beta is supposedly going to end at the start of December and the game will be released in 2008. Woah.

During the presentation they also ran the game for a hour and they weren’t lying about the gameplay trailer, as it suddenly looked A LOT better to me. Very atmospheric. It seems they’ve invested 10 million dollar in this game, so I still doubt it’ll be as polished as Warhammer Online, but it certainly isn’t vaporware. Go watch a part of the presentation on video here, and also watch the greek television piece (which thankfully has subtitles).

What I don’t understand is why there isn’t more ‘hype’ around this game, there’s barely any gamingsite reporting about it and I don’t really understand their awful PR. Not that I’m a fan of marketing stuff, I’d rather see them invest it in the actual game, but it’s still a bit awkward. Anyway, there are an awful lot of games coming out, but I think I still am actually psyched about this, I’m sceptical about them being able to run this game with 10k concurrent players though. We’ll see. It’s almost December already. Fuck. This could very well be a revolutionary MMO and the second major sandbox MMO next to EVE Online.

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4 Responses to “Darkfall Online to be released in December”

I’m not a fan of fantasy games, but Darkfall has always intrigued me because of parallels it has with EVE.

…Not least in terms of the low-levels of pre-launch press the game has gotten. Remembering EVE when it was managed by a couple of lower league publishers without much of a clue what they were dealing with, it’s easy to forget how far CCP have come — in a very long time, it should be added.

Anyway, hopefully I can get in the beta soon. EON needs a sister magazine 😉

Exactly, that’s what I think about as well when people claim it isn’t possible for a small unknown developer to come up with a decent new MMO. And 10 million dollar is probably still a lot more than what CCP used to make EVE Online in 2003.